Mobile phone users often become frustrated when interacting with call centers or other called parties, such as in noisy environments. Interactive voice response (“IVR”) systems and call center agents tediously force users to navigate through verbal prompts or menus, which take excessive amounts of the user's valuable time.
The problem can be particularly acute when a user attempts to interact with a call center in a noisy environment. In such situations, background noise can overwhelm the user's verbal responses, making proper recognition of the user's utterances difficult, if not impossible. As a result, the user may repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempt interactions with the call center or called party. Unable to interact in a convenient or timely manner, the user may ultimately experience dissatisfaction and frustration.
An IVR system or a human agent may needlessly ask a user questions and waste the time of the user. For example, a user may spend minutes navigating through an initial series of questions or menus of an IVR system, such as those which ask a user for his language or other preferences, e.g., “press one for English, or marque numero dos para Español.”
Given these and other problems, a need exists for a system that overcomes the problems, as well as provides additional benefits. Overall, the examples herein of some prior or related systems and their associated limitations are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of existing or prior systems will become apparent to those of skill in the art upon reading the following Detailed Description.